


Off the Grid

by shortystylee



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Also starring: Ben Solo's Negative Self-Talk, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, First Meetings, Fluff, Pre-Relationship, Stupid Rich Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 17:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18695722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortystylee/pseuds/shortystylee
Summary: City-boy Ben meets country-girl Rey, when his car breaks down and he ends up stranded in a small farm town.





	Off the Grid

Ben takes the next exit off the highway, following the sign at the end of the ramp to the right, the direction it says town is. He drives what feels like forever. It’s almost ten or eleven miles west off the interstate, and he soon realizes that he’s thoroughly in the  _ real  _ country. There’d been an off-brand gas station with a Subway in it right at the exit, but in ten miles he hasn’t seen anything aside from farms and a Methodist church. 

Finally, the town’s water tower comes into sight in the distance.  _ Thank fuck. Now to see if they’ve got a repair shop. _ He knows there’s no way in hell they’ve got an Audi dealer. Six had been making some god awful sounds ever since they got south of Chattanooga, and he’s starting to get worried when everything just begins to feel  _ off _ . This car, that he’s named Six, it's the closest thing he has to a child, he knows how she should feel.

Ben’s phone has barely enough signal here to do a simple Google search, but it manages to latch onto a tower somewhere. He finds and drops his car off at the only repair shop in town, whose front window says they service foreign cars, which makes him hopeful, but he notices as he walks out that it’s missing the “e” in foreign, which makes him think they just mean that some time in the past decade they changed the oil on a late model Civic, not fixed whatever the fuck is wrong with his RS4. 

Yea, Ben  _ knows _ the car is an RS4, it’s still named Six.

The owner tells him he’s unsure of how long it’ll take to diagnose, and not wanting to sit around in the humid, un-air conditioned waiting room, that somehow doesn’t have WiFi or a godsforsaken Keurig machine even though it’s  _ twenty-fucking-eighteen, _ Ben decides to go for a walk around town, see what East Jesus Nowhere has to offer at ten am on a Saturday. 

Oh, and the radio in the shop was playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia… so yea, he was definitely not sticking around for that. 

Thankfully, the town is only a couple square blocks in size, and he quickly comes upon the only happening place there - a weekly farmers market. Something in the market smells amazing, like fresh baked goods and cinnamon French toast, and he crosses the street with hopes that he can at least get something to eat. There’s the usual array of stands, selling whatever fruits and vegetables are in season, mostly all manned by what look to be Amish or probably Mennonite teens, or men and women who appear to be in their fifties or older. Others are selling cheese, eggs, cut flowers, crocheted washcloths, the list goes on. It’s what he imagines the usual small town farmers market would be like, nothing too boring, yet nothing too interesting either.

And then, then he sees her. 

He turns the corner to the next row of vendors and as soon as he does, an older man walks out of his line of sight and he sees the young woman taking care of the stand across the way. She’s of average height, with mousy brown hair in braids that circle her head, warm tanned skin that tells him she doesn’t just work at the market, she helps tend to whatever they sell too. She’s fresh-faced with big doe eyes and flurry of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she smiles widely at him when he makes eye contact, like she’s beckoning him to come her way. 

_ So that’s the East Jesus Nowhere has to offer.  _

He takes that smile as an invite whether it is or not. She’s one thousand percent not his type - she seems perky and friendly and like she’ll try to serve him sweet tea in a mason jar or pecan pie, and a supper that’ll really stick to his bones, maybe homemade macaroni and cheese, or a pot roast. His usual dates are apathetic and vapid women, the kind that look very good on paper and even better on his arm, but he bores of their lack of personality and depth, and they pale when they find out he has hobbies outside of work and charity fundraisers and golf outings.  _ If they stick around that long.  _

Ben is used to women who seem to never wear the same outfit twice, who wear shoes made by Italian design houses, and would probably see this farmers market as quaint, in a disparaging peasant sort of way, but would still use it as an opportunity to get dressed like they’re going to be seen by someone.  _ Not her, _ he realizes, getting a better look at her as he walks up. She wears a well-worn not-quite-white-anymore Georgia Tech t-shirt under a pair of denim overalls. They’re not filthy, but there’s some dirty areas and splotches of grease and paint he bets will never wash out. There's plaid patches sewn meticulously into the knees with yellow thread, the pant legs are rolled up a few inches, and she's barefoot on the concrete. 

“Now I know you’re not from ‘round here.”

“How’s that?” 

“Just gotta feelin’ I’d remember someone that looks like you,” she tells him, her eyes going back and forth between his and what he’s looking at in the stall. He’s not usually a fan of Southern accents, but there’s something about her particular drawl that he finds endearing. “‘Sides, no one here wears slacks to the Saturday market, not even Father McKenney.” She cocks her head to the left and he sees a tall man wearing jeans along with his usual black shirt and white collar. He looks down at himself: dark grey dress pants, burgundy button down, matching oxblood leather driving shoes.  _ Okay, so maybe jeans would’ve been a little less conspicuous. _

“I stick out that badly, eh?” 

“Accent’s not doing ya any favors either.” He’s half surprised she doesn’t make some remark about him being a Yankee. Though he’s been in Chicago since college, nearly fifteen years now, that Minnesotan accent of his youth likes to rear its ugly head at the worst of times, like board meeting presentations.  _ Then I spend the next week having the rest of the partners quoting Fargo at me. _ “That’s fine,” she continues, “We just don’t get many visitors. You’re more than welcome though. Anything catch your eye?”

Oh, he knows she means the various goods laid out carefully across the red-checked cloth and organized in stands on the table. He’d glanced at the table when he walked up, but it hadn't really registered in head what's being sold. Ben thinks about saying what he wants to say. Okay, a notch down from what he  _ really _ wants to say, since that would most certainly get him smacked. She's left such a nice opening for him to at least say something mildly cheeky, so he decides to go for it.  _ Not like I'll be in town long anyways. _

“You certainly have.”

She blushes prettily before her reply. “ _ Sir, _ ” she chides, her voice chastising but not angry. He caught her with her guard down. “While I appreciate the flattery, I’m sure you know I was referring to something on the table catching your eye, not someone behind it.”

_ Well, shit. That still went better than expected.  _ He’s definitely pushing his luck but…

“Perhaps you could tell me a bit more about what you’ve got to offer?”

_ Is this what flirting is like? _ He has to wonder, it’s been so long since he’s had to actually flirt with his words, be witty. Somehow he knows his usual moves - buying drinks from across the bar, not-so-covertly flashing his AmEx black card, casually slipping the extra hotel room card into their hand - even if any of that was applicable in this situation, he knows she won’t find him flaunting his wealth attractive. A vision of her at his favorite bar flits across his mind: him in his suit, women in bodycon bandage dresses gossiping about how she sticks out. And she does, and it’s because she’s radiant, uncaring that cotton gingham sundresses and sensible sandals don’t meet the dress code of this particular establishment. He’d notice her the second she walked in the room, leaving the confused bouncer in her wake. No one would dare say a thing, knowing she was with him. 

“How rude of me. I can’t expect you to want any of my goods without knowing the first thing about ‘em.” It’s subtle enough that he’s not quite sure if she’s playing along. 

But then, then she winks at him. 

He’s underestimated this one. Played into her wholesome looks and her charm and that angelic halo of braided hair.  _ Maybe waiting for my car to get fixed won’t suck so much after all.  _

She waves him into the semi-circle of her stand, and starts going over everything. Strawberries, golden raspberries, peas, beans, and every type of herb and salad green you could name. Beeswax candles and bear-shaped bottles of honey. Lavender, oatmeal, and mint-scented soaps. Chicken and duck eggs, all in mismatching cartons, crocheted hotpads, ziplock bags of cornmeal. She opens the large cooler on the ground to show him vacuum-sealed bags of dough, labeled for pie crust, pizza, or sugar cookies on one side of a divider, and whole chickens on the other. 

She continues to talk, giving him samples, and he continues to listen, and to ask whatever questions he can think to continue the conversation. 

A storm passes through while he's talking to her, a hard downpour that seems to come out of nowhere. He’d checked the weather that morning when he left his hotel in Chattanooga, and this had been nowhere on the radar. The commotion under the farmers’ market stalls stops, with everyone, vendors and shoppers alike, peering out from underneath the overhangs and staring up at the dark sky.

“Don’t worry, rain like that comes through and it’ll only last ‘bout twenty minutes,” Rey assures him. She nudges him with her elbow to get his attention as she points across the town square. “See those trees? How fast the wind’s blowing? It’s not gonna stick around.”

There’s nothing else for her to explain about what she’s selling, and she seems to sense correctly that Ben doesn’t want to leave, especially not in this downpour. He’s not sure how to tell her he wants to keep talking, about anything. The weather, how exactly she makes those beeswax candles, the history of this town, anything. 

She doesn’t have an extra folding chair for him to sit on, so she carries hers around from behind and then grabs out a big plastic bucket from under the table. “I don't wanna know how much those pants cost you. Enough that I know you shouldn’t sit on the bottom of a five gallon bucket though.” 

Ben opens his mouth to protest,  _ sure, they’re expensive, and dry-clean only, but I’ve got plenty of other pairs of dress pants. _ Before he can say anything, she pushes the folding chair towards him and plops herself down on the orange plastic Home Depot bucket, a satisfied look on her face.  

They do end up talking about whatever he can think of, in between other customers walking up. There’s conversation about anything and everything, from what’s in season in Georgia in July, to her favorite things about the humongous pick-up truck behind her stall, and his car stuck in the shop a few blocks away.

And she’s right about the rain. About twenty-five minutes and too many samples of her handmade peanut brittle later, the rain slows to a stop, and the clouds give way to the sunny skies they’d had earlier. 

Not long after the sky clears, his cell phone rings. 

“Seven-oh-six?” he says aloud, his voice confused by the number he doesn’t recognize. 

“Oh, that’s local here. Could be the shop.” He looks at her, still uncertain, so she continues. “Ya know, for your car?”

“Right… how could I have forgotten?” She smiles prettily at him.  _ Right, that’s how I forgot.  _

He answers the phone and she’s right - it is the shop, asking if he's available to walk back over, now that the rain has stopped. Ben glances over his shoulder at Rey, making change for a customer who’s buying two pints of golden raspberries and a crocheted pot holder. He has to leave, there's no real reason to hang out at the market. 

_ What’d you think was going to happen _ , some place in the back of his mind asks.  _ Did you think that a little flirtatious banter over a whole forty-five minutes was going to lead to something more? Oh, and she’s working too, you creep.  _ Part of him wonders if maybe she wants to grab lunch after the market closes.  _ For real? She's probably not even into you. Bet all her niceness is just that southern hospitality. As if she'd actually be attracted to someone like you. _

“Sounds like you’ve gotta head out,” she says when he hangs up.

“Yea.” His voice trails off as he shoves his phone back into his pocket. 

“Well, hopefully the rest of your work trip goes according to plan. Glad I got a chance to talk to you, though…”

“Ben,” he tells her, realizing somehow they hadn’t exchanged names. 

“Hello, Ben.” Rey’s voice is as sweet as can be, and he’s unused to hearing someone say his name with so much… affection. Contempt, anger, lust… hell, he’s even heard his name said with reverence a time or two. She smiles again and offers out her hand. “I’m Rey.” Her hand is small in his, and warm. Her fingers feel nimble and her palms are calloused from the rough nature of her work.

He keeps his hand wrapped around hers for a beat longer than normal, if this was a business meeting handshake it'd certainly be unprofessional, and he mumbles out a goodbye. Ben’s halfway to the end of the vendor stalls when a hand grabs onto his forearm. 

When he turns, it’s Rey, who else, and she’s pushing a package of peanut brittle into his hands. “Thought you might like some, for the road.”

“Thank you.” And he means it. He can’t remember the last time someone gave him something. His assistant brings him Starbucks, but she uses his account in the app to pay for it, so that hardly counts. But something given to him with no hopes for anything in return? He guesses it has to be the chocolate babka his mother still sends him for Hanukkah each year, packaged in those Christmas shortbread tins. 

He spends the walk to the repair shop wondering if Rey likes chocolate - more specifically, if she’d like his mother’s chocolate babka.  _ Are you insane, _ that voice chimes in again.  _ First, you’re asking her on a lunch date and now she’s coming over to your parents for Hanukkah? Is she looking at your baby photo albums? In the kitchen with your mother helping shred potatoes for latkes? What type of curtains does she like for the baby’s room? _

Ben frequently wishes he could just have a goddamn daydream in peace, without his negative self-talk knocking him down a couple hundred pegs. 

_ Oh, you mean that negative self-talk that you told your therapist wasn’t an issue anymore? Don’t you remember when she asked you to say three positive things about yourself and all you could come up with was that you’re a good tipper and are excellent at sudoku?  _

Thankfully, before he has anymore time to argue more with his self-conscious, he notices that he’s only one storefront away from the repair shop.

The bell attached to the door clangs against the glass as he walks in, and the same men he’d spoken with earlier are both waiting behind the counter. Ben is smart, even his douchebag inner voice won’t argue that fact, but cars are one thing he does not know about. Sure, he can talk a pretty convincing game about makes and models and knows how to handle them behind the wheel, but he feels his brain fogging up and his eyes glazing over as the guy with  _ Mack  _ embroidered on the chest of his work shirt explains what’s wrong. Mack seems to notice and thankfully speeds the conversation along. 

“Anywho, I talked to Audi dealer down in the city, and they can definitely get ya looked at once ya get towed down there.” 

“Is there a company nearby that could help with the tow?” It’s not the best outcome; he’d been hoping whatever was wrong was minor and could be fixed here, but at least once he’s down in the city he can rent a car to use for the rest of the week. 

“There is, but…”

“But, what?”

“I’m sure you noticed that rain that passed through.” Ben nods, and he does not have a good feeling about where this is going. “Bridge across the river is out. You’re not getting towed anywhere until that’s fixed.” 

_ Calm, calm thoughts. _ His hand that's already balled into a fist relaxes.  _ It is not this man’s fault, _ Ben tells himself. “How did that little amount of rain manage to wash out a bridge?”

“Shit, that’s bridge’s been itching to fall for years. I‘m surprised it lasted this long.” 

_ Okay. It’s Saturday. Early Saturday, at that. You’ll get a hotel room, hang out until it’s fixed. _

“Can either of you recommend a hotel in town I can stay at until the bridge is fixed?” 

Both men just stare at each other for a few of the longest seconds Ben’s ever lived through, and then the reason for their silence dawns on him. “There’s no hotels in town, are there?”

Joey, the quieter of the two pipes up as Mack just shakes his head. “Ya know, maybe he could stay up at the Dameron place?”

“Is that like a bed & breakfast?” he asking, hoping to hell that it is. Nice quiet B&B would make sense in a town like this, right? Next best thing to a hotel, Ben figures. 

“Sort of. It’s a farm, but they do take in boarders and workers, so they usually have extra rooms to let,” Mack explains. “And I’m sure they’ll serve you breakfast if you ask real nice.”

He doesn’t love the idea of staying in whatever quarters are available at a farm, however he loves the idea of sleeping outside for the weekend much less. “Worth a shot.”

“Great! I’ll give the lady a ring.” He grabs the phone handle off the wall and dials a number from memory. “Hey, sweetheart. It’s Mack. You ain’t got an extra room up at the homestead, do you?... You do? Well, I dunno if you heard yet, but the bridge is washed out and… yes, finally, I know… but I got someone with a busted car stuck here from outta town with no place to stay, so I was thinking -- you’re sure? Great… just after two? He’ll be ready. Thanks.” He hangs the phone up, a satisfied smile on his face. “I knew they’d pull through. They’ll come and get you just after two.”

Mack and Joey close the shop up a few minutes before noon, putting a sign up in the window that says they’ll return in fifteen minutes, and invite Ben to lunch with them at a diner a block away. He agrees, since though he’d like to try, he knows he can’t live solely off what’s left of the peanut brittle. They end up spending much more than fifteen minutes at lunch, bullshitting about the upcoming college football season, and head back to the shop just after one.

Naturally, the two have work to get back to, so Ben finds himself in the humid waiting room with an oscillating fan and an extra large styrofoam cup of sweet tea from the diner. By the time two pm rolls around, he’s pretty sure he’s read every issue of Outdoor Living and Car & Driver from the last six months and now knows more about deer hunting and how to tie the latest fishing flies than he ever needed to.

At ten minutes after two, he hears a bell ding and sees a lifted gray F-250 pickup pull up in front of the shop. 

“Your ride’s here,” Mack announces as he walks back into the lobby, pushing the rolling suitcase out from where Ben had stored it behind the counter. He thanks them, and they assure him that his baby is safe and sound until the bridge is done. “Besides, with it making noises like that, neither of us even wanna take her for a spin.” 

He can’t blame them. 

The bells on the door chime as he walks out of the shop with his carry-on sized luggage rolling behind him, and he looks up at the same time as the truck’s door opens and the driver jumps down. 

It’s her, from the farmer’s market.  _ Rey. _ The only difference is that now all her unsold things and the tables and chairs are in the truck bed instead of at market and she’s put on a pair of Keds that he imagines were white at some point, years ago when they were new.

“Ya know, I had a feeling you’d be who I was coming to get.”

“That so?” He stops when he’s a few feet away from the truck. Ben’s a tall guy, but this truck is huge, especially compared to Rey. He’s not used to seeing monstrosities like this in the city, and for a second he imagines it painted a bright neon color with some monster truck name across the side. 

“Well, Mack only said it was some new guy in town, but Joey sent me a text with something about a city fella wearing dress pants.” She waves him over closer. “Come on, climb on in. Throw your suitcase in the backseat, plenty of room. There’s chores I gotta get working on once we’re back at the house, so we can’t dawdle.” She lets out a bit of a laugh before she continues. “We get back late and I’ll have to put you to work too.”

A farm had sounded better than sleeping outside, but one that just happens to be the same one where she lived? 

_ Apparently I did something goddamn astonishing in a past life to deserve this reward… even if I might have to do some manual labor. _


End file.
